Catspaw

by Joan D. Vinge

  “Do what you want with him, then,” Charon was saying. He started for the door. “Just get results. And control him—keep him away from me.”

  He had to pass by me one last time to get to the door. He glanced down at me, as if something had caught his eye; stopped. “Where did you get that earring?”

  I shook my head, still dazed. I raised my hand to my ear; felt the slick, cold surface of the cut glass under my fingertip. Froze. “I—uh—got it from a street vendor.”

  He grunted, and went on out. The door sealed behind him, leaving me alone with Braedee.

  “All right,” Braedee said. “What do you want?”

  “What?” I couldn’t remember what he was talking about. I rubbed my eyes, feeling the pressure/pain build behind them.

  “You know what I’m talking about.” He moved two steps one way, two steps back, his hands locked behind him. His eyes were on me all the time. “To keep quiet about last night.”

  I laughed. It didn’t sound real. “Oh. That.”

  He stopped moving. “What the hell’s the matter with you?” He was half afraid that I was just plain crazy.

  I looked up at him again. “You used me,” I said. “You bastard, you were using me all the time—you and the taMings. There was no plot against the Lady, not before last night! You set her up, so you could use me to fuck her over.”

  He stared at me.

  “‘How do I know all that’?” Taking the words right out of his mind. “How do you think I know, deadhead?”

  His face went white with fear, and fury. He looked at the chair we’d both sat in.

  “It didn’t work, Braedee.”

  His black eyes snapped back to me. “You were reading us all along. You sat down anyway. Why?”

  “Come on,” I said. “Wouldn’t you have done it, if you were me?”

  He looked at the chair again. “I didn’t think it was possible.” For me to have fooled his lie detectors. For him to have been so wrong.

  He’d really believed I was that much of a coward. That stupid. A punk kid, another screwed-up freak. No threat, no problem. “Surprise.” I said.

  And then I watched his hand reach for the gun hidden under the smooth line of his uniform jacket.… For a minute he really didn’t know whether he was going to let me live or kill me—

  I sat there while he decided, feeling my palms go clammy with sweat as I suddenly wondered if I’d misread him even worse than he’d misread me.

  His hand came out of his coat again, at last. He needed me.… He was still frowning, thinking I knew everything he thought; but I watched his body ease out of its systems alert. He lifted his shoulders, in something that almost looked like a shrug. “So you know it all, now. I’ll repeat my question—what do you want?”

  I sighed. “How about an apology?” I said, just to see if I’d get one. I didn’t. “You want me to work for you—for real, this time. Lady Elnear’s no good to you dead, and you really think I can do something to help you keep her alive. That’s what you were telling Charon. Right?” He nodded, barely. “That’s what I want, too.”

  He looked surprised. “Why?”

  My mouth twisted. “You want to hear something else I’ve learned since I came here? The only real difference between a combine vip like Charon and a streetrat like me is how many people believe the lies we tell.… I don’t enjoy feeling like your whore. And that’s what I’ll feel like if I leave now. I want to finish this job, now that it means something.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I suppose that’s reasonable.” He didn’t know what to believe about me any more, and it bothered him.

  “But it’ll cost you.”

  He smiled, relieved. He could relate to that. “That’s what I thought. Centauri will double the amount of your contracts.”

  “All of it—for the Center, too.”

  “Of course.” He nodded.

  “Do it now.”

  He glanced away from me for a long second, and back. “It’s done.”

  “I’ll check it when I get home.” The formless couch was beginning to give me a sensory deprivation attack. I stood up, shaking it off. “What happened to Elnear’s Security people?” They’d been witnesses—the only witnesses—to my warning him about the bomb.

  “Don’t ask questions you don’t really want answered.” He folded his arms; watching my expression. “You think you’ve figured out how to play this game, don’t you? Just because you hold the key pieces, right now.” He shook his head slowly. “Believe me, boy, you’ve had beginner’s luck. Don’t push it.” Meaning that I’d been stupid not to spill what I knew about him when I had the chance. Because if he hadn’t decided right then that he needed me, there would have been one more fatality after that explosion.

  I rubbed my hands on my pants legs. Then I said, “There’s one more thing I want.”

  He raised his eyebrows. “What is it?”

  “I need stronger drugs.”

  “No.” His mind closed like a door.

  “I’m still half-crippled, Braedee. What you got me isn’t good enough. I can’t do what I need to do, if you really want my help.” My hands flexed. “And I’m starting to get … symptoms.”

  “I can’t get you anything stronger. The board wouldn’t permit it. I had a hell of a time even getting you this far.”

  “You can do it if you want to. If Lady Elnear winds up dead, Centauri loses ChemEnGen. And you lose, too.… That’s heavier on the scale than what Gentleman Charon thinks of psions.”

  “I can’t do it.”

  “You owe me. Get me the drugs.”

  “I can’t.” He shook his head. “You underestimate how difficult it is for me to get what you need. That’s not some streetcorner dreamdot you’re asking for. Charon monitors everything that’s done concerning you.… You also underestimate how much he resents your presence here.”

  I made a face, my hands tightening again.

  “I’ll give you this,” he said finally. “I’ll give you space. If you can get what you want somewhere else, I won’t stop you.”

  I nodded, surprised.

  “Lady Elnear is still at the hospital. She is expecting you to join her there. I don’t have to tell you to keep your mouth shut about what you know. Do I—?”

  I hesitated. “I guess not.”

  He nodded at the door. Somehow it had opened again while my back was turned.

  I started for it, happy to be going out.

  “One more thing.”

  I stopped. “What?”

  “That earring. I wouldn’t wear it again, if I were you. Particularly not around Charon.”

  My hand went to my ear, covering it, protecting it. “Why not?” Not quite able to keep all the tension out of my voice. “It’s only a piece of glass.”

  His lips pulled up. “It’s an emerald, you fool.”

  I stared at him, still touching my ear. “What—?”

  He’d scanned its density just by looking at me. He looked at me now, and shook his head again. “You’re lying about where you got it, too. It carries a taMing registry code; it belongs to Lady Lazuli.”

  My hand dropped to my side. I turned and went out the door. I felt his eyes following my back as I crossed the endless, lifeless room beyond.

  SIXTEEN

  ELNEAR WAS WAITING in still another private lounge when I got to the med center. She looked like a different woman from the one we’d left there last night. Philipa was going to live. It was all over her face, her mind. “How is she?” I asked the question anyway, so that she could tell me herself.

  “She’s going to be fine. Everything is going to be fine.” She stood up, smiling that smile that made you feel like you’d just stepped into sunlight. Actually smiling it at me. After spending time with Braedee and Charon, getting that smile was like winning a prize. Right then I probably would have jumped out a window if she’d asked me to. The smile faded again, as she said, “Someone said that you were injured—”

  I touched my should
er; hardly even felt any soreness. Surprised by that, too. “Nothing much,” I said softly, remembering to answer her, “ma’am. Glad to hear the good news.” Not as glad as she was, but close, for her sake. “Have you seen her?”

  Elnear shook her head. “No. She’s still in the intensive unit; she’ll be there until the reconstructive work is finished. It will be several weeks, they say.” Her voice got a little weak. “She’s suspended, of course, so she wouldn’t know that I was there.…” But still she wished she could be. “At least she’ll have only peace, no memory of—of this pain.”

  “She’s lucky to have friends like you.” Saying it because I couldn’t help remembering what happened to people who didn’t have friends like her. Loyal … and rich. I touched my shoulder again, looking away at the flow-mural wavering aimlessly over the far wall.

  She glanced at me, curious, but she only asked, “Have you talked with Braedee?”

  I nodded. I sat down on the long sofa next to her, suddenly feeling tired.

  “I seem to have misjudged Centauri, for once. It seems he was right all along about how much I needed you.”

  I kept my face empty. “Yes, ma’am. I guess so.”

  “Are you still thinking about yesterday?” she said, trying to read my expression. “About Stryger? About all the—injustice?”

  I was thinking about today. But I nodded, because hearing her say Stryger’s name suddenly made me remember yesterday. I looked back at her, as the final thing she’d said registered. Injustice.

  “Yes,” she said, answering what was clear enough on my face now. “I’ve seen the Morning Report.”

  I laughed once. “I slept through it.” The Indy’s Morning Report—that was what Charon had been talking about. “It must have been good.” Or at least not as bad as I’d figured. “I seem to be the only person in the galaxy who missed it.”

  “I hope so.” She smiled again, but this time it was full of steel. “I hope everyone sees it. Do you want to see it now? I can call it up.”

  I nodded, and the mural that no one had been watching suddenly disappeared from the wall across the room. A new image came onscreen, jumping out at us as it went threedy. Sound came with it in a blare that made me wince. Shander Mandragora was suddenly in the room, somehow looking me right in the eye while he repeated yesterday’s news. The only way I could tell he wasn’t actually there was by the empty place where his mind should have been. But then, after what I’d seen last night, that probably didn’t prove anything. I waited for some lurid full-feed of the bombing; feeling my eyes try to look away. But instead the report was on the debate between Elnear and Stryger. Images from it opened out behind Mandragora as if he could project his own memories; he could, in a way. I watched Stryger tell his lies about me again. I started to frown, wondering why Elnear wanted to make me look at this.

  And then suddenly it was me up there, “refuting the charges in his own words”—reliving last night, up against the wall with Lazuli and Jiro while the hypers closed in on me. I looked down, away from it.

  But Elnear’s hand closed on my shoulder, giving me a gentle shake, forcing me to look up at the screen again.

  “I killed him in self defense!” my reflection shouted, looking me straight in the eye. “And to save my friends, and to save your stinking telhassium. I wasn’t a traitor, I worked for the FTA—”

  But before I heard the insult I’d blurted next, my image was gone again. Mandragora was back, telling me how the Indy had “researched these conflicting versions of the incident. Here is the actual record,” he said, not even smiling. “Let it speak for itself.”

  He stepped aside, into some spacewarp, and I sat up straighter, with all my attention on the show now as I saw something I’d never seen before: part of an original tape about what had happened after I’d killed Quicksilver. A Mines official I remembered, a man named Tanake, was describing how the psionic arch-criminal Quicksilver and his terrorists had nearly taken control of the telhassium supply. His version of what had happened didn’t match my memories of it; probably just as well.

  But then he was thanking the FTA’s Security Arm for “fighting fire with fire”; admitting right there in front of the entire Federation that it had been psions working undercover inside Quicksilver’s terrorist group who’d been the ones who stopped him—the only ones who could have done it, mind against mind.…

  A sudden gust of wind, a sudden change of scene, and suddenly I was looking out across a winter-white Quarro from someplace up high: Jule and Siebeling stood together on the balcony of a house … being interviewed, having their five minutes of fame. They didn’t look like they were enjoying it much; but they did their best to make a good impression. The voice-over and visual stats were making a lot of Siebeling’s professional standing and Jule’s family ties; trying to prove something. I watched them, listened to them, breathing in a memory of the cold sharp air of a winter’s day with every breath. Siebeling did most of the talking, like he always did, used to it. Jule had always saved her words, turned them into poems instead. Siebeling was talking about Dere Cortelyou, the corporate telepath who’d first broken through my mental walls and forced my mind out of hiding. Our friend, who’d died there on Cinder, killed by Quicksilver. Then I listened to him talking about me, about why I wasn’t there beside them when I was the one who deserved the real credit for stopping Quicksilver.…

  I tried to touch the place where my mind had been while that was happening—couldn’t. A dizziness like the fear of falling made my brain sing.

  “… I had a nervous breakdown,” my mirror image was saying across the room. “That’s what it means to be a psion, and kill somebody.…” I looked up, seeing myself last night again, trapped, badgered, like an animal in a cage. “… And I guess it still doesn’t mean shit to be a psion and a hero.”

  I watched myself push out of view and disappear, as Mandragora suddenly reappeared, to point out the obvious, about me, about me and the Lady, about Stryger’s “incomplete data.” It wasn’t exactly an apology, and the asinine questions he’d thrown at me himself had all been trimmed away. But he’d given me what I’d wanted after all. Maybe he wasn’t such a bastard.

  Elnear was leaning back on the couch, her arms folded comfortably, watching me with a look that was somewhere between curiosity and satisfaction.

  I shook my head, as the fax finally winked off, taking the past with it.

  “So,” she said. “The truth sets us free.”

  I turned toward her. “You really think that can make up for what Stryger did?”

  “It will certainly help. Why—don’t you believe that it will?”

  “It’s only one version of the story. The lies have already got it outnumbered.” I shrugged. “Even what you saw wasn’t really the truth. It was what happened … but it wasn’t the truth.” I thought about Centauri. They’d been a part of the truth for me back then, just like they were now; part of the combine conspiracy that had backed Quicksilver. I wondered how many people in the entire galaxy besides me knew that. Jule knew it; and somebody might even have listened to her. But she hadn’t told anyone. Blood was still thicker than water.

  Elnear sat there next to me, looking tired but content. She thought she knew the whole truth about what had happened at the Federation Mines on Cinder; she thought she knew the whole truth about what was happening now.

  I couldn’t let her go on believing it. She had to know everything about what Centauri had done. She’d never win otherwise, never get clear of them. I remembered where we were, and how easily even the hypers had planted eavesdroppers last night. I couldn’t tell her anything here. “Ma’am, I haven’t eaten yet. How about you? I saw a noodle joint a couple of levels up, on my way here—”

  She looked surprised at the sudden change of subject. But then she realized how exhausted, how hungry, she really was. “Yes, of course … I haven’t eaten a thing since yesterday afternoon. And I didn’t have much of an appetite then.” She smiled, rueful. “But there’
s no need to go out; I can have food brought to us here.”

  “Hospital food?” I asked, and made a face. Damn. “I’d rather have a plate of noodles.”

  “It can be anything you want,” she said, still smiling. “Do you really want that?”

  I’d forgotten what it meant to be a taMing, for just a minute.… I put my foot up across my knee; my fist began to tap a frustrated rhythm on it. I rested my head against the wall, staring at nothing, as I reached out with all the gentleness and control I could still manage, and touched her mind. (Lady,) I thought. She jerked; her eyes went wide. (Don’t panic—I need to talk to you. Outside.)

  She sat blinking for a second as if someone had shone a light straight into her eyes. When she seemed to register me again, she murmured, “Well … perhaps you’re right. I can’t stay here forever. There are things to be done. Now that I know Philipa will be all right.…” She got up, following my lead like a sleepwalker.

  By the time we were in a mod she’d taken charge again, taking us back to the FTA plex, through the security scanners, into what ought to be the most privacy anyone could hope for on this planet. But we didn’t go to her office. Instead she took me to the delegate’s restaurant, on an open terrace at the pinnacle of an ancient tower. The roof garden was filled with small tables underneath umbrellas of living tree. You could look out and down across the geologic layers of time and structure that made up the city all around, and yet still believe you were out in the open air under a perfect sky. The sky was a monomole shield, so flawless that I couldn’t tell it from the real thing, looking up at it from below. The higher towers touched it, supported it like rigid fingers.

  Elnear ordered us lunch, and spent the time until it came pointing out historic landmarks to me, as if there was nothing more important on either of our minds. Some of the pre-space structures went back eight hundred years; and this was a new city, for Earth. I remembered when I’d thought the buildings in Oldcity were old. There’d been so much intermediate buildup here that by now it was hard to tell what the forms of most of the original structures had been. The one I could see best was an inverted cone, the whole building balanced on a tip a few dozen meters wide. “It was built when composites were first introduced,” Elnear said, when I asked about it. “The architects of the period tended to be a little … giddy.” She smiled.